


show me joy; flowers through disarray

by ohmygodwhy



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Character Study, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, POV Second Person, Pre-Relationship, if u like gideon this is not the fic for u lol, this boy has been through a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-17 16:45:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12369864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy
Summary: at six months clean, morgan took you out for ice cream like both of you were kids, but you didn’t mind, because it felt nice sliding down your throat. made you feel alive. aware. you learned to like being aware, again. morgan said he was really proud of you. you didn’t cry. later, jj hugged you and said she was really proud of you, too. (you did cry, that time.)or: sometimes he thinks he was too young.





	show me joy; flowers through disarray

**Author's Note:**

> i've been watching a lot of cm lately, catching up on the latest season and then jumping around a little, and eventually this kinda came about on it's own?? and then got away from me real quick. first time writing for this show, so have whatever this is lol
> 
> (warning for v vaguely implied rape)

 

i.

 

sometimes you think you were too young. for a lot of things. for everything, maybe.

you were in high school at twelve, college at sixteen, had a doctorate and a half under your belt two years later. met jason gideon somewhere in the middle. joined the BAU at twenty-one and sharp and bright, and all your professors were sure you were wasting your potential, even if most of them didn't say so in so many words—but you wanted to help people, wanted to _understand_ people the way you always had so much trouble doing. wanted to stop bad things before they happened, wanted to make a tangible difference in the world. and gideon said you had wonderful potential, would make a great profiler. took you under his wing and pushed you down the path he thought was best. it was always what he thought was best, no matter if it was a case or a career choice or a move in chess. you soaked it all up—the attention, the advice—the way you did with every piece of information you could find.

you just wanted to _know_. about _everything._

you had always wanted to know—your mom used to say you were insatiable, when you would bring home big books from the library and climbed up on the old ladder tucked away in the garage to rearrange the plastic stars on your ceiling to mimic the constellations more accurately. your dad used to say you should slow down, go outside, play some kickball, have some fun. you were having fun, you would say, you were discovering things you’d never discovered before. and there was so much to discover. your dad would say he didn’t understand you, and your mom would get upset, and they would argue, and you would focus more on your book and try to drown it out.

when you were eight years old, you read somewhere that microorganisms and bacteria were everywhere, all the time, on everything, and that germs spread so easy it was terrifying. you went through a medical phase around the same time, connected the dots and read about contagious diseases and all kinds of nasty symptoms and about how door handles pass them along like gum getting stuck on the bottom of your shoe, except way more likely, because life wasn’t a cartoon, obviously. it’s physically safer to kiss than to shake hands. you said this to a girl at school once, and she thought you were hitting on her, which you weren’t because you were three years younger than her because you were a freshman in high school by then.

the point is you never really forget about that particular book; it sticks out in your mind through all your years of schooling and all your years after that, until your brief time in jail kind of knocks that out of you by sheer force. knocks a lot of things out of you.

and when you stop to think about it—before the Prison Thing, even; years before that—you think you might have been too young.

morgan knew that for sure—the first day on the job he had balked at your age, and your title ( _doctor?_ he’d repeated, with that little raise of his eyebrow he wore around you a lot, _at twenty-one?_ ”) and he’d turned to gideon after he thought you were out of earshot and said _you serious? he’s gonna get shot, man. twenty-one?_

and gideon had said _he went through the same training you did_ , and morgan had said _you really think he’s ready for this? for the field? we see some nasty stuff,_ and gideon had said _he’s ready,_ and that had been it, because gideon rarely felt the need to explain himself if he wasn’t prompted. and even then, you had to catch him in the right mood to get anything concrete, most of the time. that’s just how he was.

at the time, you didn’t think much of it. people had been doubting you because of your age your whole life. you weren’t really expecting anything less. besides, morgan warmed up to you pretty quickly after that, even if it was hard to tell at first. hotch was very serious but also open to any questions you had. never dismissed anything you asked or said. valued your input, even if you always said too much about things unrelated or unnecessary.

you had been trained for the nasty things, anyways. you’d been well-read before you ever set foot in the BAU office. (books hardly ever prepare you for the real thing, though, which is something you had to learn the hard way; but you learned it quickly, the way you learn almost everything. it was a trait all your professors valued, and all your peers did not.)

 

ii.

  
nothing could have prepared your for tobias. or for his father, or for his arcangel. you thought you were going to die, in that shed. you thought you were going to be shot, or die of dehydration—because it felt much much longer than two days with just a few sips of water, and the human body can only last eight to ten days at the very unlikely most without it—or maybe an overdose. sometimes you thought you would die of the latter afterwards, too, used to dream about someone finding you in your apartment days after the fact because you pumped yourself too full of drugs to get away from everything that you got away forever.

the point is you spent two days of torture and drugs and fear like you never felt before in a shed in a cemetery in the middle of nowhere. the point is you could never bring yourself to hate tobias. not really. you were afraid of him, of his father, of his angel, of his bible, and maybe you hated the last three, but you couldn’t hate him, because he was gentle and brought you water and food even though you weren’t awake long enough to actually eat any before it was gone. he was afraid just like you. he was too young, too.

in the low light you could see the little cross burned into his forehead. you asked him, quietly, to match his feeble tone, what had happened. _i needed to learn the way of the lord,_ he had said, rolling your sock carefully back onto your aching foot.

 _from who?_ you asked. he just looked at you, the way he did when he saw that his father had beat you. later, he said that he was ten. when you were ten, your father left. you never could hate tobias.

he never could hate you, either. smoothed your collar down after his father jerked you around. ran his hands gentle though your hair after the camera turned off. (god, the camera. you never asked about it, afterwards. you never wanted to know what parts of it they saw.) he touched you soft and tried to calm you down even when you panicked and asked him not to and bit your lip so you wouldn’t cry, said you were a gift that god had given him. he didn’t even do very much, never even unzipped your pants. his father yelled at you after tobias went away, called you a sodomite and hit you so hard your ears rang. but tobias brought you back to life, hours later. and the team never had to see it, so it was fine. you never told anyone about it. you were fine.

tobias died and so did his father and so did the angel, and you didn’t want him to die but you knew that if he survived, so would the others. you think he knew that, too.

and he was right: it helped. the dilaudid. gideon knew but he didn’t do anything. offered vague advice like he always did and left you to figure it out on your own. you did, eventually, because you always do, but it was hard. and you didn’t do it by yourself, really—you work with a team of profilers. people pushed you in the right direction.

at six months clean, morgan took you out for ice cream like both of you were kids, but you didn’t mind, because it felt nice sliding down your throat. made you feel alive. aware. you learned to like being aware, again. morgan said he was really proud of you. you didn’t cry. later, jj hugged you and said she was really proud of you, too. (you did cry, that time.)

gideon left and so did your father, and both of them left a note. gideon’s was vague and your father’s was short and both of them cut deep in ways you didn’t know they could. both of them were running away. children abandoned by a father or father figure were two percent more likely to drop out of high school, so you beat the statistics, there. they were also more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, but you think that was more due to the torture-induced trauma, so you like to think you beat that one, too.

life goes one. time heals some, but not all. people come and go and come back and go again.

morgan is a constant and so is jj and so is hotch and so is garcia. you’re okay.

 

iii.

 

you’re always so full. of thoughts, and tidbits of information that you find interesting but no one else really does. that seem to relate to you, but don’t to everybody else. when you get nervous, you talk, and when you get excited, you talk, and when you get scared, you talk. when you’re passionate, you talk quick and loud. when you’re on a roll, you just talk quick. move your hands a lot. it’s hard to gage when people are interested or when they’re annoyed or when they’re fondly exasperated. you’ve found you inspire all three.

sometimes you’re on a case, and you’re strung out thin and you mind just keeps moving and turning because there’s so much to sort through. it’s hard to pick out the important bits. when your head is going too fast for your mouth to keep up with, losing your train of thought and jumping to places unrelated that just keep coming and coming— _easy there kid, slow down,_ morgan will say, _we don’t need a vocab lesson right now_ , or _you’re losing me_ , or _take a breath,_ and the things you were saying before, and the point you were trying to make.

one day, because you think he understands, you say: _i think i was too young._

the two of you are the only ones left in the office; hotch has, miraculously, gone home already. you’ve been having headaches, lately, and you can’t sleep, so you’ve been staying later and later and morgan has caught you in the act and sat you down firmly on a chair on the other side of his desk and told you to talk.

 _for what?_ he asks.

 _for everything,_ you say.

he looks at you for a long moment, at your messy hair and the bags under your eyes and your fingernails bitten clean off, and says _yeah, i know._ his eyes are very sad.

_you think gideon knew that, too?_

_don’t know,_ morgan says, shrugging one loose shoulder, even though he sounds like he does have an opinion. _he knew a lot of things._

 _yeah,_ you agree, thinking about your first day on the job and his hand on your shoulder and the needles in your arm. _he did._

morgan takes you out for breakfast the next day, because the next day is saturday, and he says you need to get off your ass and smell the sunshine. you tell him it’s physically impossible to do that. he hands you your usual coffee order, which he inexplicably knows, and says to stop taking everything so literally all the time, it’s bad for your health.

 

iv.

 

you think you were too young, and then fast-forward five or six years and you feel so old, watching your friend’s throat get sliced open five feet away from you, and hotch is gone by now and so is morgan, and you haven’t shot up in years and it was forced on you, this time, and it feels like a violation, like the first time in the shed all over again. you get out but it takes something out of you. something else out of you, because everything has already taken so much.

once you told hotch that sometimes you think gideon was right, in leaving. you lie awake in your cell and you think so, now, too. you think of him leaving and then dying. you think of your mom. you think of morgan leaving and living. emily leaving and dying and coming back to life.

morgan visits you in prison, which shouldn’t surprise you, but does. you still talk, pretty regularly. he’s doing good, you think, his son with your name in his own is growing up beautifully; he sends you pictures, because he’s so so proud. (once he voiced fears, late at night, of being a bad father; he knows the statistics, probably better than you do, about child abuse affecting one’s ability as a parent. you tell him he’s a wonderful father, and it’s good that he’s aware of the dangers, but you know that he’d never harm a hair on anyone’s head, let alone his son’s. he seems grateful.)

the point is he visits you in prison. you almost cry when you see him, because you’re exhausted and afraid and you want all of this to be over, and you haven’t seen him in person in months and months. you shouldn’t be surprised but you are. he left but he came back, just for you. just for this.

 _how you holding up, kid?_ he asks. like it’s any other day at the office. like nothing has changed.

 _oh you know,_ you say, _kinda wanna die, kinda don’t. the usual._

 _spencer,_ he says, vaguely alarmed, and you try to smile, cut him off.

 _you need to stop taking everything so literally,_ you say, a ghost of a memory of the coffee on the tip of your tongue, _it’s bad for your health._

morgan is rendered silent for a moment, the way he used to look at you when you said something that went right over his head, some vague fact that didn’t matter, before he laughs. a little shocked, a little fond.

 _jesus, pretty boy,_ he says; something warm spreads through your chest at the years-old nickname; _don’t talk like that. people’ll start to take you seriously._

you smile, and don’t say that your joke was only half so. he doesn’t say that he already knows.

 _don’t you have a new job to get back to?_ you ask.

 _i do,_ he says, _but it can wait. i’m not planning on leaving ‘till we get your ass outta here._

 _could be a while_ , you say, around the sudden lump in your throat.

 _i know,_ he says. _but we’ll be with you every step of the way._

he lays a hand over yours, a light touch—against the rules, but you can’t bring yourself to care much about those, anymore—that lights your skin on fire. it’s been so long.

 _thank you,_ you say, so you don’t choke on your irrational relief. you know that just because morgan is here, doesn’t mean that things will be any easier, or go any faster, but you feel. safer. more secure, even though nothing has really changed. you tuck that away to psychoanalyze later, after you can’t fall asleep for fear your own throat might get cut. _thank you._

 

v.

when you do get out, you find that you don’t really want to leave, anymore. you’re surprised no one else wants you to leave, either. you’re old enough now, you think. and this job has taken enough from you that it would be a waste to quit at it now. besides, you think, you have unfinished business.

 

**Author's Note:**

> feedback is always v appreciated, comment to save a life (my life)


End file.
